No, I don’t mean the dog, I mean when you group with people to do content that you may not know. In today’s article, I’m going to talk about the expectations that people have when you enter a pug group and whether or not they are fair to ask such a thing.

BioWare has announced, in partnership with ESL, a brand new contest. In a post by Eric Musco, we have some of the details. This new contest will pit eight person teams in timed runs through Operations in story mode. The qualifying rounds will begin next Tuesday, March 3rd.

Yay! I got to see the new Operation, Terror from Beyond, with my new sixteen-man raid team. First impressions are very favorable and best of all? I got to see color! There’s a very cool effect partway in that I thought was very clever.

It seems that the Black Hole commendations dropped by bosses in Story Mode operations have been sucked into some powerful vortex from which nothing can escape, not even light. While not revealed in the initial patch notes, it was soon discovered that the bosses in Story Mode Explosive Conflict were not dropping Black Hole commendations any more. BioWare Senior Support Coordinator Allyson Berryman quickly chimed in, promising to look into whether the issue was caused by a bug or if it was an intentional design change. She quickly responded back to the community, indicating that it was indeed an intentional change:

“I do have an update on this issue. This change was intentional, and we’ll be adding it to the patch notes. Bosses in Story Mode Operations no longer drop Black Hole Commendations in Game Update 1.4. Thanks to everyone who brought this up, and we apologize for the confusion over it.”

This includes Terror from Beyond’s Story Mode. As of 9/28/12, the patch notes have been updated to indicate the removal of Black Hole commendations.

It has been over four months since Explosive Conflict was released. I don’t know about you all, but I am itching to see some new content! I understand that there has been some turmoil and staff cuts going on at Bioware, but I seem to recall them saying that they had about a year’s worth of content ready to be released. So let me ask this now: Where’s the beef?Continue reading »